City of Launceston swaps paper for tablets

Customer requests now entered into asset management system

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The City of Launceston in Tasmania has used a mobile work management offering to reduce its paper usage and improve response times to customer requests.

A trial was conducted in September 2014 with two arborist crews and a drainage crew given ruggedised tablets with the TechnologyOne software loaded.

In February this year, 25 ruggedised tablets were rolled out to other council crews. Another 15 tablets will be introduced in July.

City of Launceston technical services manager Shane Eberhardt said that it chose ruggedised tablets as these were the only devices that could withstand outdoor use.

“One of the areas we needed to improve was our response to customer requests. Everything was paper-based and required a lot of manual data entry to get information into our system, which was very time consuming and not cost effective,” he said.

Customer requests and maintenance schedules are now in a system which council crews can access while out in the field. In addition, job safety assessments and traffic management plans can be filled out on the tablets and added to the work order, he said.

“With the work management solution, we are now closing out customer requests much quicker. Previously, we weren’t completing a lot of these because the administration process was too complex,” said Eberhardt.

He added that the tablets have made work crews more accountable for their time and provides the council with better visibility of work orders.

“This enables us to capture more accurate data around job costing. The big benefit will be spending budget more wisely as we can be more transparent about where we’re spending the money and how we’re prioritising work.”